according to UPI, police are treating this as a hate crime. that would be a state-level enhancement, since there is no national hate crime enhancement for crimes targeted at gay people because they are gay. this is why we need the Matthew Shepard Act.
laurelsays
Mark Doty has responded to the vile misuse of his poem:
“This is just repellent,” Mark Doty writes in an email. “On the literal level, my poem is about looking at fish on ice in the grocery store, and wondering if they could be called individuals. But I wrote in ’94, in the crisis years of the epidemic, and so I was really thinking about mortality. I was trying to imagine some way to make the loss of those we love seem even temporarily bearable.
“So I was thinking about what it means to ‘have’ a self, to be a self, when selfhood is something we lose. I was trying to console myself and others, at least a little, for all we’d endured. So, it’s especially ugly for these words to be used against gay men. Writers have no control over what people do with their words, but this is as far from my intention as you could get.”
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p>BTW, the only Seattle media mention of a terrorist threat to 11 gay bars, besides The SLOG’s ongoing coverage, is a blog entry on the Seattle PI’s website. As a commenter pointedly asked, if 11 churches or 11 schools had been targeted, would there be a wall of media silence?
according to UPI, police are treating this as a hate crime. that would be a state-level enhancement, since there is no national hate crime enhancement for crimes targeted at gay people because they are gay. this is why we need the Matthew Shepard Act.
Mark Doty has responded to the vile misuse of his poem:
<
p>BTW, the only Seattle media mention of a terrorist threat to 11 gay bars, besides The SLOG’s ongoing coverage, is a blog entry on the Seattle PI’s website. As a commenter pointedly asked, if 11 churches or 11 schools had been targeted, would there be a wall of media silence?